Republicans talk a lot about the horrors of Big Government, but I’m not sure that most people know what we are talking about. Why is big bad? What part is too big? Why the fuss? And what difference does it make? The impetus today was notice of a solicitation by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

They want the submachine guns to have a sling, be lightweight and have an oversized trigger guard for gloved operation. Note the plural ‘guns,’ but there is no mention of the numbers of submachine guns that are required, or just who the Department is planning to attack, for these are surely assault weapons. The U.S. Department of Agriculture!

The question everyone would ask is— what the hell does the Department of Agriculture need with submachine guns? And why does the Department of Education need a SWAT Team? Why did the BLM descend on the Bundy ranch with some 200 armed troops? They could have easily called on the local sheriff’s department to arrest Mr. Bundy and bring him in for failing to pay his grazing fees.

We are seeing way too many incidents of U.S. government SWAT teams descending on ordinary businesses, guns drawn, with trumped-up charges. Gibson Guitars comes to mind, and the Sacketts case in Northern Idaho that went all the way to the Supreme Court when the EPA falsely claimed their property was a wetland. There are dozens of such cases, if not hundreds.

The government has reached a pinnacle of overreach. They are doing way too many things that they should not be doing at all. The government should not be doing those things which private enterprise can do better and less expensively. Everyone would probably have their own list of what should be eliminated, but the Department of Education, the Energy Department, the EPA would be high on my list. The First Lady should not be planning school lunches, and the curriculum should be the task of local school boards.

Instead, the administration is downsizing the military— the Army is going to reduce their active duty force by another 30,000 in the next 17 months to drawdown forces to 450,000 by 2017. This is ostensibly because of budget pressures. Yet the number one task of the Executive Branch is national security in a time of rising danger in the world to which the administration seems oblivious.

Misguided priorities, ideologically dispensed funding, taxpayer money diverted to cronies, and government money directed to political purposes. The promised transparency never appeared and waste and fraud are covered up. The bloated nature of the nation’s capitol just keeps expanding, and with each expansion, oversight diminishes. At a certain point no one any longer knows where the money is going, what the departments are really doing, or how to shrink the government enough so we can actually understand what they are doing. Big Government does not do anything well, and some things they do so badly, they should be forced to turn it over to private enterprise at once.